The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu Review

A cursed jungle expedition that's best survived with a crew.

Even if you haven’t been exposed to it by name, ACE Team is something you’ve certainly heard of. After all, they’re the people behind Zeno Clash, The Eternal Cylinder, and other titles that have a certain quirkiness about their art direction, which continues in The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu.

Nacon has picked up publishing rights to the title, and that seems to be doing the game justice, as it’s clear that they’re putting money into both the game’s visuals and audio department. You might not expect a cooperative horror game where you play as Spanish conquistadors searching for Cthulhu artifacts in an environment that doesn’t want you there. 

The environment sets you off in the Age of Exploration by setting sail on your galleon along with a handful of explorers. The visuals, even the dialogue, are very devoutly Catholic. The players genuinely believe that God is leading them towards these relics.

The whole situation becomes rather amusing when the players figure out the truth about their finds. The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu doesn't lean on cutscenes to tell its story. Instead, you piece it together from logbooks scattered around the jungle, and successfully carrying one out safely unlocks narrated audio back on the galleon.

It's slow-burning, environmental storytelling, and it suits an eldritch horror premise where the characters have no idea how far over their heads they really are. As you keep clearing expeditions, you start rescuing stranded NPCs, and they join your roster as playable characters for future runs, which is a nicer surprise than you'd expect from a game like this.

Structurally, The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu plays like a repeating expedition loop, and this is really where the game asks you to settle into its rhythm.

You sign a contract back on the galleon, get handed a set amount of starting gear split between however many of you are playing, then head into a fixed map to fill an ox wagon with anything valuable: relics, deer carcasses, mushrooms, loose coins, whatever you can haul.

The ox wagon follows behind you as you move, and it doesn't take long before your whole group is just yelling at the ox to hurry up. Check your inventory screen, and you get a deliberately rough estimate of how much your haul is worth against the contract's target, alongside a ticking in-game clock that never tells you exactly how much time you have left before things turn ugly.

That vagueness feels intentional, and it works in The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu's favor. The jungle itself reacts to noise, so charging around and firing guns constantly makes everything more dangerous, while moving carefully and quietly keeps you safer for longer. 

There's a horn you can sound to signal your position to separated teammates, which matters because the game will occasionally scatter your group entirely, sometimes by knocking everyone out and waking you up in different parts of the map. It'll also drop a mirror copy of one of your friends into the jungle to wander back toward the group, and you genuinely won't know whether it's really them until you've made a call about whether to shoot.

Gear is limited enough between a full team that you naturally fall into roles.

Someone grabs the armor, someone takes the crossbow, and everyone else scavenges as they go. Managing your inventory is clunky by design, and while that's meant to add friction and immersion, it can tip into just feeling awkward. Crossplay runs across PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S, though sticking with your own platform's crew avoids some of the matchmaking hassle people have run into trying to link up across systems.

The distortion of perceptions is definitely the most interesting trick in The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu. The more time you spend in the jungle, the more your mind becomes distorted. Your friend may turn into something with teeth, the sky, which was previously blue, starts to pour bloody rain, and you remember having a gun or some other object in your hand a moment ago, but can't find it.

It's the kind of thing that only really lands in multiplayer, since everyone's seeing something slightly different and nobody can fully trust what they're being told over the radio. There are stretches where you'll genuinely question whether a piece of loot you picked up ever existed, or whether the friend walking beside you is actually your friend.

Between that and the occasional appearance of a giant red moon or a sudden blackout that teleports the group apart, The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu leans hard into psychological horror rather than scripted jump scares, and for the most part, that restraint pays off. On top of the sanity mechanics, it keeps things unpredictable by mixing up what actually happens to you out in the field from one expedition to the next. 

Sometimes you'll find yourself edging into psychosis the longer you stay out.

Sometimes a flock of bird-like monsters will spawn practically on top of you with no warning, and sometimes you'll wander into what people have started calling the Fog Realm, a stretch of the map where how you see your own allies gets scrambled even further.

Combine in the rare instance of an impostor disguised as one of your crewmates, and you have a game that is always presenting you with new challenges despite the fact that you are basically performing the exact relic run that you have performed multiple times already. This is the type of unpredictability that keeps The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu always new, despite the fact that you might be aware of all the maps.

And then there’s the game’s prelude mission aboard the galleon that takes place when the character is not in the middle of an expedition. In spite of some weaknesses that can be found here and there, the mission is carried out pretty decently, and the prologue itself is short, taking maybe a minute at best.

Picking your explorer and your gear happens here too, along with an FOV slider and a few extra camera options if the default feels off. When you make it back from a run, two NPCs size up whatever you hauled in, almost sitting in judgment of your take, which gives every expedition a small sense of closure, whether you came back loaded with relics or just a sack of mushrooms for the galleon's cook.

There's a real Indiana Jones feeling running through it all, torn between wanting these cursed relics to end up somewhere safe and just wanting to get paid for the trouble.

One small annoyance in The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu is worth flagging. There's no jump button, so getting your ox wagon wedged against a rock or a ledge is a real possibility, and when it happens, there's not much to do except go around and hope for the best. The combat system is intentionally clumsy, and for the most part, it is a good thing. 

Muskets and flintlocks are single-use firearms that take time to reload and often misfire in a sudden downpour, forcing you to rely on bows and crossbows more than you'd expect. Swings have a noticeable delay and an after-the-fact wobble once you've committed to a hit, meant to sell the weight of these old-world weapons, but mostly resulting in whiffed attacks that looked like they should've connected.

There's no block option either, so trading blows in melee usually means eating damage from things that shouldn't hit as hard as they do. In this case, backstabbing and execution are the way to go since having one player lure the monster in order for the other to attack it from the back makes battles much easier and helps you conserve some of the scarce resources.

In fact, some of the bigger monsters were never intended to be killed by fighting them directly, and running may be the best course of action. In terms of being frustrating, dodging attacks from your enemies feels like cheating, while how fast the monsters close the gap compared to your character's sluggish sprint may appear unfair at the beginning, before you learn the rules of the game.

Weapons degrade and break quickly under heavy use.

While there are other weapons available to find during the mission, and there is an anvil for repairing your gear, a lack of luck may result in an unpleasant situation. Where The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu falls a little flat is in progression. It isn't big on traditional advancement systems. 

There's no skill tree and no strong sense of your character getting objectively stronger, which can feel like a gap once the missions start blurring together after a few hours without something concrete to chase. What little leveling exists mostly nets small, minor buffs rather than anything that puts you far ahead of someone just starting out.

The more meaningful sense of progress comes from rescuing NPCs and adding them to your roster, though the differences between characters' looks and sounds are cosmetic rather than mechanical. By opting for the Deluxe Edition, you get two more characters, some skin choices for your weapons, an exclusive quest, and the game soundtrack.

But there is a cool feature that lets you send your initial skins to your teammates even if they do not have the DLC. Apart from these, everything else that will make you better in the game will come through knowledge of maps, relics, and monsters' behavior. This is also the moment when visuals become essential for The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu in making you feel unsettled.

The visuals of this game are quite impressive indeed.

The game is developed on Unreal Engine 5, and its art style, which includes ruined cities, rotten galleons, and other disturbing elements of wildlife, adds to its oppressiveness. The game is running at 4K up from the internally scaled resolution with the objective of achieving 60 fps, though there are frequent hiccups once things heat up.

Gamers who play this on PC with top-notch hardware have reported the same issue, and it is indeed challenging, regardless of whether you are playing on PS5 or PC. Despite the few stutters, the atmosphere holds its ground well, and the environment does the heavy lifting of generating fear for the player.

Sound design might be the strongest part of the whole package, and it's arguably where The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu does its best work. It uses proximity-based voice chat by default, and it's genuinely better than jumping on a separate voice app, since half the tension comes from not being completely sure who's actually near you at any given moment.

The score shifts noticeably during extractions, building real pressure as you're hauling loot back toward the boat, and the ambient jungle noise does a lot to sell the idea that something out there is always listening. The one recurring complaint is mic volume, since some players wished there was an in-game boost option, as headset mics can come through quieter than you'd like during tense moments.

The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu is a genuinely interesting entry in the co-op horror space.

The game is closer in spirit to something like GTFO or Vermintide than the jump-scare-heavy horror games it easily could have leaned into. All of these features, the atmospheric quality, the audio design, and the ability to throw off your assessment of your fellow players, are all definite pros, and the cycle of signing deals, collecting plunder, and gradually gaining new characters and plot elements is a good thing for its replay value. 

The gameplay problems, the brutally hard difficulty, even on the lower settings, the tedious inventory system, and the lack of any feeling of character development are the elements that need to be noted before purchasing this game. It is obviously designed for a complete team. Solo play with AI companions technically works, but it's a noticeably thinner, lonelier version of the experience, and the AI isn't much help when things actually go wrong.

If you've got two or three other people who are into slow-burn horror and don't mind some jank, The Mound: Omen of Cthulhu is worth picking up, especially while it's discounted. If you mainly plan to play solo or want a game that is fully refined from day one, then this game might be an interesting title to wishlist and see how it turns out after one or two patches.